Of course Hillary Clinton is going to run for president

Why is the media covering this as if it were a question? It’s never too early to run for president. And Hillary Clinton has been running for president since 1993. So unless health or age issues get in her way, you and I both know there’s no way she’s sitting out 2016.

Here are five of the most obvious reasons:

1 – There’s no one in the Democratic Party who possesses her abilities or her name recognition; certainly, no one who can marshal the kind of heavy hitters and money needed to pull it off. There’s no charismatic upstart to trip her up. Andrew Cuomo? Martin O’Malley? Elizabeth Warren? John Hickenlooper? Joe Biden? There’s no Barack Obama in sight. Today we learned that James Carville has joined efforts to start raising money. “He is the first of several heavy hitters who will be rolled out by Ready for Hillary PAC,” a Clinton-backer told the Washington Post. There are three other PACs already raising funds for Hillary.

2- She’s really popular. Last poll I could dig up measuring her approval rating was from Quinnipiac University earlier this year. In it, Clinton had a 61 percent approval rating among voters with a 34 percent unfavorable rating. And this survey was conducted after the Benghazi controversy. Obviously, that number deflates once partisan politics takes hold of us, but what other candidate has that kind of head start? And what kind of politician wouldn’t look at those numbers and feel embolden to run?

3 – She has to run. This is the woman who believed herself qualified to lead an effort to craft and then implement a massive overhaul of the entire health-care system, despite her complete lack of expertise or experience on such matters. This is the same women who decided to run for the Senate lacking any of the experience most people might associated with the position– most notably living in the state she allegedly represented.

4- No candidate will have the media rooting for them like Hillary. Simon & Schuster just announced that Hillary was writing another memoir. It will be released in 2014. In it, she will “use a number of dramatic moments … of tenure as Secretary of State to frame her thoughts about the recent history of U.S. foreign policy and the urgent, ongoing need for American leadership in a changing world,” and will discuss events including the “killing of Osama Bin Laden; the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime in Libya; the transitions in Iraq and Afghanistan; [and] the Arab Spring…”

The new book will undoubtedly cast our heroine as the mighty leader who restored our credibility in this dangerous world. How long after its release will the media start asking: Was Hillary the best Secretary of State of all time? I suspect, you know the answer.